#Astlibra Revision

[setzeri]

My personal Game Awards of 2023. Good games from the year, or older games I played in the past year and liked.

[couldtransitionsaveher]

THE HERO from ASTLIBRA REVISION

JUSTIFICATION:

"Literally in an early flashback it's revealed that when asked what they'd want to be reborn as they answer "a girl", they always wear a ribbon gifted to them by their female childhood friend, often crossdresses for plot reasons, and is noted to be interested in trying make-up." - Anonymous

Reminder: Submissions are always open! Submit here!

Did you make your daily click today?

[danannie521]

Plada

[k----k]

[shrimpmandan]

The only way Astlibra Revision could've been improved as a video game would be if the protag got hrt / a personalized pair of the woman TF earrings and entered a transgender polycule with Karon, Kuro, and Lilica/Anulis

[haku-sg]

【ASTLIBRA Revision】リリース記念に描かせていただきました！PVに登場していた担当しているボスのセルフファンアートです。

14年越しにご公開となったフリー版 【ASTLIBRA】 では、約十年程前、12年前に描いた一枚のドラゴンイラストを提供させていただき、またその後日に、趣味で制作していたカードワース向け素材の中からもご連絡を頂きまして素材を提供させていただいておりました。

そこからご縁が続きまして、 【ASTLIBRA Revision】としてsteamでのリリースが決定した際、大変ありがたいことにKEIZO様に再びお声がけを頂きまして、この度一部ボスグラフィックを担当させていただく運びとなりました。

十数年経った今でも、絵を描き続けていて良かったと心より思う出来事です。本当にありがとうございます…！！

時間があっという間に溶けてしまうような素晴らしいゲームですので、是非…どうぞ宜しくお願いいたします！！

Steam版 ASTLIBRA Revision

【https://store.steampowered.com/app/1718570/ASTLIBRA_Revision/?beta=1】

ASTLIBRA Revision 特設サイト

【https://www.astlibrarevision.com/】

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2022/10/13　ASTLIBRA Revisionリリース

2022/10/15

[satoshi-mochida]

The Switch version of ASTLIBRA Revision releases today digitally. It is also available on Steam.

[clickbliss]

Astlibra Revison is an RPG of a tremendous scale

by Amr (@siegarettes)

Astlibra Revision

Developers - KEIZO

Publisher - Whisper Games

PC, Switch

As Astlibra opens, your character finds himself stranded in a cabin at the edge of a lake, with nothing but an endless forest in front of him. After years at the cabin, he finally resolves to escape, trekking for eight years without contact through the forest, with no idea of when he may finally reach the edge. 

Developed over the course of 15 years, by solo developer Keizo, you can feel the creator’s preoccupation with time and scale throughout Astlibra. The story’s themes are obsessed with time, with how our actions reverberate through it, and what we would do if given the opportunity to go back and change them. The scale of the game itself is tremendous, with system after system stacked upon each other in a way that wouldn’t feel out of place in a Tri-Ace title. Every system has been reexamined, throwing off the general assumptions of the genre.

Simple interactions such as buying an item from a shop have been complicated, requiring you to have the appropriate materials on hand to purchase them, keeping you on the lookout for new drops from enemies, or experimenting with the crafting system to see if you can work out the recipe. Grinding these materials will naturally push you into the multiple growth systems, with both a traditional skill point system, but also a sprawling map of character bonuses that can be purchased with gems dropped from enemies. This cartographic journey will unlock more abilities, and ability slots, getting you excited to head right back into combat and keep the loop going. 

Combat has the vibes of a later Ys title, if the series had continued following a sidescrolling format. The basic moveset isn't too complicated, with a ground combo, a launcher and spike, and a shield. Early on you'll also get an invincible back dash and magic spells, which enable some strong hit and run tactics. There's a varied arsenal to collect, and while they generally don't have significant moveset changes, considerations like range, attack speed and the unique skills you gain from mastering them keep weapons in rotation even as you progress. 

Positioning plays a huge part in combat, and the small cooldowns when your shield breaks, or your backdash ends can end with fatal damage if you're caught in the wrong group of enemies. Magic becomes essential here, providing crowd control and the ability to reposition yourself, with invincibility during the duration of the move. Mana builds through combat, empties outside of it, so you're also incentivized to use spells as soon as you're able, since you'll never be able to stockpile it for future battles. 

Despite the myriad ways to prevent damage, you'll rarely come out of a battle unscathed, so spending and refreshing resources becomes essential to surviving even basic encounters. Astlibra is unafraid to push you to take advantage of every system, to the point where the very first boss appears nearly unbeatable until you learn every system. It's an ambitious and gutsy choice, one of many that go against conventional wisdom in modern RPG design. Astlibra is full of these, and it’s a true feat that it manages to remain coherent throughout. 

A similar sentiment could be said about Astlibra’s aesthetics. Collaged almost entirely from a number of royalty free images and sound sources, Astlibra has a distinct look to it that calls to mind early Playstation games, where digitized imagery began to become popular. Stitching these images into a single world is a feat of its own, and it manages to stay coherent enough that it never draws attention to itself. Part of this is thanks to a group of professional artists, including Vanillaware veteran Shigatake, who provided the character portraits and sprites, and Haku Tatsufuchi, who created the art for the dragon bosses. The music is equally well selected, with a variety of musical styles, but all feeling as appropriate as if they were composed for the game. The most surprising were the tracks for the many emotional moments of Astlibra, which did a fantastic job selling the drama, something hard to do even in games with bespoke soundtracks. 

It’s those big character moments that form the core of Astlibra for me. Even as I enjoyed playing with the various systems of the game, all of it remained motivated by my desire to unravel the next mystery, and my impatience for the next plot beat. Astlibra is full of heart, and it was impossible for me not to be charmed by it. 

When you spend so many years working on a single thing, it’s hard not to lose faith in what you’re making, and harder to keep a coherent vision as you and the world around you continue to change. Despite the odds, Astlibra manages to hit on every aspect it tries for. It’s a triumph that kept me astounded at what a single person could accomplish. 

[gaiden-gamer]

I have been playing extremely good game Astlibra Revision for the past few weeks and finally got to the end and it was awesome, playing the theme song of the game at the final boss' theme was kino, and I'm still not done cause there's a final chapter and it does the thing

Extremely good game.

[professoricepick]

Top 10 Games I Want Ported FROM PC VIII: First Contact

Well, it’s safe to say that I spoke too soon when I promised that I’d write my next article by February. Granted, it’s not that I haven’t been writing. Quite the opposite, in fact. The problem is that most of the energy I’ve spent writing thus far in 2023 has been focused …elsewhere. While I do have ideas for more Retronaissance articles, my free time has been at a premium since last June. And to…

[jorrmungandr]

Game of the Year 2022

Game of the Year 2022

Ahhh, it’s that time again. This was a weird year for me, in terms of games. There was the release of something that I had been looking forward to for a long time, but it didn’t really hit for me. I spent the first half of the year paralyzed with fear and absorbed in old favorites, and the latter half too busy to get into anything new. So, there’s not a lot to go on here, really. But, I’ve still…

[dalmek]

playing a game full of audibly royalty-free music only for this to come on and stun me for a few seconds

[danannie521]

Anulis

🌼🌸

[eccentric-nucleus]

actually if i'm gonna make a games rec post.

here are some games i have enjoyed recent-ish.

kenshi. an open-world squad-based rpg with base-building elements. get stronger by getting beaten up. lose a fight and get knocked out, have your weapons and food taken by the bandits that mugged you and left you bleeding to death. get rescued by some slavers that capture you and sell you into slavery. free yourself from slavery and limp away until you roll in hours later with a whole squad of overpowered fighters. then head a little bit too far south and get murdered by skin bandits. they take your skin. this is a completely self-directed game; there's no "main plot", although arguably "figure out the history of the world" is kind of the main 'story' mystery. there's also a bunch of unique recruitable characters with custom-written interactions. i usually recruit exclusively from freeing slaves but you can do w/e.

wildmender. a survival gardening game. this one came out recently and the devs are still releasing bugfixes; it's unclear if they'll make large content patches in the future. apparently multiplayer can still be pretty glitchy, and there's a water flow bug that i've been finding very frustrating. the way biomes work is kind of unsatisfying. kind of slim content-wise, but still, i really enjoyed what's there. out of all of the climate change terraforming anxiety games i've seen, this has been the one i've most enjoyed.

hellpoint. a scifi soulslike made by a team of like 12 people. previously i had thought things like "it would be neat if dark souls was less linear". hellpoint is a great example of why that might be a nightmare. the areas are connected in such a complex way, with one-way routes and branching unlock keys and secret paths and hidden doors behind hidden doors that it gets profoundly disorienting. a hint: almost every single hidden door in the game (there are a lot) is the middle panel of the same exact three-paneled-wall geometry. once you notice what it is you will see it everywhere. also, the enemy designs are hot.

crystal project. remember playing fan translations of final fantasy v? remember wandering around in old mmos? crystal project is kind of a... turn-based rpg mmo-influenced platformer. with a job system. you can sequence break the game from the tutorial level and also at basically every other point in the game too, although until you know what to look for it might seem like there's a linear critical path. but there's a lot out there. hint: play on easy mode. the combat gets tough later on and the game absolutely expects you to be finding and exploiting some class combinations.

astlibra: revision. a sidescrolling rpg. it must have been released episodically originally or some of the chapter pacing makes no sense. also it was originally released with a mess of art sourced from all sorts of places; 'revision' is a re-release with a more unified art style. it gets extremely anime all the time. there's a whole obligatory section where you have to ask all the women in a town about what kind of panties they're wearing. it's rough. i enjoyed how chaotic the systems are and how much Stuff there is to pick up and upgrade and unlock. the plot goes some unexpected places though it doesn't quite stick the landing, i still enjoyed what it did. also karon should be the love interest instead.

silicon zeroes. a cpu-building puzzle game. this straddles the line between the tech/code games that are literally just "learn a new language and code in it" and ones that are more structure-themed like, idk, spacechem. connect modules to assemble solutions to problems. it takes too long to get to chapter 3, which is where they start asking you to make entire cpus.

ashen. another souls-like. i just really like the environments in this one. the initial area looks gorgeous and the way it changes through the game is really neat to see happen. the seat of the matriarch is wonderfully awful to traverse and i wish there had been two or three more dungeons like it in the game. you can't level up; you gain stats mostly by progressing sidequests and the name quest. i eventually ran out of things to spend money on AND inventory space to store items. the late-game tuning is a little rough but until then it's great. a hint: there are three weapon types and within that type nearly all the weapons are identical. you get thrown so many weapons that don't matter; don't worry about collecting all of them. see above re: running out of space and things to use money for.

i guess it would be cheating to recommend minecraft regrowth or morrowind but i have also been playing those.